Facebook Would Like You to Stop Being Horny

Facebook has updated its community standards to ban all sexual solicitation on the platform, which—when you read the fine print—turns out to include pretty much any acknowledgment that sex exists. I want to have fun tonight is now a violation. So is I’d love to give you a massage again. Vague innuendo, sexualized slang, any mention of sexual positions or fetish scenarios, illustrated or digital artwork depicting or seeming to depict explicit acts—all of it, gone. They’ve decided it’s easier to kill the whole category than to figure out the difference between exploitation and two adults being flirty on the internet.

Alexander Fanta and Chris Köver covered this over at Netzpolitik.org: Facebook’s stated justification is that moderators find it difficult to distinguish sexual exploitation from consensual behavior. Which—fine, maybe. But the solution they’ve landed on is treating their entire user base as potential sex criminals until proven otherwise. The same platform that has spent years struggling to remove actual hate speech, actual harassment, actual incitement has decided the thing it can act on decisively is horniness. Remarkable priorities.

Whether this applies to private messages or just public posts isn’t clear from the new standards. Which means the sensible move is to build a private lexicon. "Sex" is now "potato salad." A blowjob is "the evening commute." And whatever elaborate scenario you’ve been building up to—"hello" covers it. The platform will never know. We’ll all be fine.